But where would Mariah Carey ski?

I had just finished reading a headline in
the May 15 New York Times online,
“Scientists Back Off Theory of a Colder Europe in a Warming
World,” when I picked High Country News out of my mailbox and
read the column about “climate-change denial” written
by the director of environmental affairs for Aspen Ski Company
(HCN, 5/14/07).

According to the
scientists in the NYT article, the science of climate change is not
settled. Yet Schendler claims that the science is so certain that
only a person with a personality defect could question it. He uses
an ad hominem attack on so-called skeptics of global warming by
comparing them to ignorant medieval prelates and racists but did
not write a word to refute any of their arguments.

Aspen
Ski Company, for which Schendler works, earns its living as a
company by attracting tens of thousands of customers who travel
from around the world to stay in well-heated hotel rooms in the
middle of a Rocky Mountain winter. This uses a lot of fossil fuels
and produces a lot of CO2. These customers then pay Aspen Ski
Company to carry them up mountains using electrically powered heavy
machinery so they can ski down on snow that is groomed by
diesel-consuming, CO2-spewing, heavy tractors. No matter how many
so-called green actions the company takes, it will only ameliorate
a small part of its huge carbon footprint. The ski company’s
own Web site brags about having replaced 30 percent of 90
two-stroke snowmobiles since 2004. Thus this multimillion dollar
corporation isn’t even environmentally committed enough to
spend a few hundred thousand dollars to get rid of the remaining 63
or so machines that are still using some of the dirtiest internal
combustion engines that exist.

Schendler’s column is
a classic case of seeing the mote in someone’s else’s
eye while ignoring the beam in his employer’s. If Schendler
is right about global warming and its cause and if Aspen Ski
Company is truly serious about fighting global warming, the most
responsible, and least hypocritical, thing for it to do is close
down.